The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of the Super-Rich and the EconomyStewart Lansley

Why does the modern economy consist of two tracks: a fast one for the super-rich and a stalled one for everyone else? What decisions led to this split three decades ago, and were their goals realised? What is the cost of a two-track economy? Have the real solutions to the 2008-9 been missed?

This ground-breaking book, based on years of research, seeks to answer these questions and provide the hard evidence:

- for the economic case for dismantling the economy for the super-rich;

- that deregulation failed to deliver

innovation and economic revival;

- for new policies that avoid the looming permanent recession.

At a time when top investors such as Warren Buffett call for an end to the coddling of billionaires, this urgent and provocative book provides a new way of thinking for ending the economic deadlock.

Book Details:

Stewart Lansley is a writer and economic consultant. After university he became an academic economist holding research posts at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and the Centre for Environmental Studies specialising in poverty, inequality and wealth.He has also taught at the Universities of Reading and Brunel. He then moved into television journalism, producing many television series including Breadline Britain, Death of Apartheid, Kenyon Confronts and Food Junkies. He holds awards from the BFI, the New York TV and Film Festival, Sony, Amnesty and was nominated for a do...More about Stewart Lansley

Book Reviews

"Lansley's new work belongs on every “people's library” shelf in an Occupy movement encampment. Your bookshelf, too. "Institute for Policy Studies

"...exposes the truth about the economic catastrophe that afflicts the western world: neoliberalism has created consumsr societies in which millions are so poor they cannot afford to consume. "New Statesman

"
Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the reasons behind the astonishing growth in inequality in the UK and US over the past 30 years – and why it helped to bring about the unprecedented economic crisis we are all now facing. Readable, well-argued and a devastating critique of neo-liberal laissez-faire economics that has allowed the growth of a new generation of super-rich ‘Robber Barrons’ by economist and financial journalist Stuart Lansley."Church Action on Poverty

"His central argument, impressively documented in a tour through the workings of modern capitalism, is that growing inequality caused the financial meltdown of 2008. ...make everyone you know read this."Brussels Labour

"
Lansley adds value, making the forceful case that the rapid rise in wages and profits in the financial sector crowded out other forms of private-sector growth.....Lansley's second line of thought is equally compelling.... the central arguments of Lansley's book - and the solutions he proposes - deserve a wide hearing and an urgent place on the policy agenda."Times Higher Education Supplement

"Stewart Lansley's seminal book."Guardian

"...great new book … Lansley intricately, and with a great wealth of research, shows us the great failure of neo-liberal politics, and how it is has contributed to today’s normalisation of crisis. But he also develops a reason to dispute TINA (There is No Alternative)."Carl Packman, Left Foot Forward

"This timely book examines the toll that inequality takes on the economy… shows how the real lessons of the financial crisis risk being quietly forgotten… The book’s important message: Inequality does have a cost that policy can and should address."Europe’s World

"Crammed with data and evidence, with this book in your hand you never need go into an argument unarmed."Christopher Hird, Red Pepper

"A great book – read it!"Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level

"Very timely."Sunday Times

"Clear…correct."Money Week

"Places the issue of inequality squarely at the root of the crisis."New Internationalist

"well-written and presented, clear in its analysis and recommendations. "Journal of Social Policy

"
Anybody who is concerned about the gap between top and bottom incomes in our society will enjoy reading Stewart Lansley’s The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality is Essential for Recovery. The book does a good job of joining the dots between different pre-crisis trends – the divergence of incomes and the ‘disappearing middle’ in the jobs market, the growing debt burden as people borrowed to consume as well as buy houses, the housing bubble itself, banking deregulation, the worship of shareholder value, mega-bonuses...an excellent birds-eye view of the malign consequences of the financial sector-driven, unsustainable increase in inequality, and of the damage that has caused the US and UK economies. "Enlightenment Economics

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...demonstrates very convincingly that excessive and growing inequality was not only the cause of our current economic crisis—the worst since the Great Depression—but that it is lethal to capitalism itself, and if not corrected will lead us into a state of permanent recession."Political Quarterly